I'm knee-deep in the grunt work of research for NANOWRIMO--luckily, I get to read about beautiful, driven ballerinas (every little girl's wish...err...at least, every little girl who is clumsy, and a tomboy, and a bookworm. Much safer to read about ballet than to try and pull it off physically, you see.). On that note, anyone who knows of good autobiographies or histories of ballet, please be sure to share!
Here's the tease; the subject is Dame Alicia Markova, world renowned prima:
"It was at this time that the Manchester Guardian wrote about Giselle: 'It is not necessary to say that Markova is a dancer of very great genius, and yet the scene in which she realizes, as the program charmingly phrases it, that *she has bestowed the fullness of her virgin love on one who can never be hers, and goes quietly and convincingly mad, owes less to her dancing than to her acting. Markova, one thinks, could be a great Ophelia, without a movement of her body. And yet it is precisely because she made her body reproduce a life- less travesty of the dance she had so bewitchingly executed with her lover ten minutes before that she achieved her effect.'" --Alicia Markova: Her Life and Art by Anton Dolin
And I'm going to try some more high-tech witchery and post you all a Youtube clip of Markova dancing Giselle. All the clips of her and Anton together were rather blurry; this is one of the best I've found:
I can't wait until I'm onto Anna Pavlova's stuff; "The Dying Swan" is absolutely stunning....Yeah, I'm in geek-out mode.
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